Try a New Essential Oil: Highest Potential

Each month I make a new order with Young Living to replace the oils I've used throughout the month. One of the best parts is getting to try out an oil I haven't purchased before. I love being a guinea pig when it comes to my oils!

This month I bought two new oils, Myrrh, to help strengthen our teeth and gums, which you'll see in a future blog post, and Highest Potential. Highest Potential I got in the spirit of assessing whether an oil blend might help inspire me to reach my "highest potential." 

I'll Be in the Kitchen

Moving status update: 

We're about 2/3 of the way packed.

One room that has remained largely out and unpacked is the kitchen. Jeff has talked about how much is left in there and what all is left to be done.

I suppose there is a reason for that. I packed a lot of the kitchen six weeks ago - but nothing since then. My kitchen... I start to pull boxes into that room, and I find some reason to deflect to another room to pack first.

The Game of Not-My-LIFE

Chef loves when we have game night - he loves the challenge of trying to beat Papa, even if it is only in a game of chance rather than skill. But the problem is that sometimes, lots of times, he either wants to play games that are out of his league (and thinks he is top-of-the-line at them) OR he wants to play a game that everyone can join in but that is so mind-numbingly boring that we sometimes question why we ever brought it into the house! This past weekend, the choices were "LIFE" or "Super-Scrabble". We love Scrabble, but it is a four-person game and every one of the kids wanted their own piece of the board game pie, which would have dragged it out waaaaaaayyyy past bedtime, at the least!

So Scrabble was set aside for another night and we cracked LIFE out of storage. We started out by taking our little $100,000 bank loans to go to college and rolled downhill in our opinion of the game from there. Now that we're looking with more scrutiny at our lives and what values we endorse through our actions and possessions, we notice more than we might have before.

Little Moments of Domestic Memory

Not pictures from my childhood - but of memories my own children may one day have of our "little" family!

I don't have many memories of my earlier childhood years, and what I do have are foggy and more like dreams than reality. Sometimes I question whether or not a "memory" really happened or is something that my mind made up somewhere along the way. I'm not sure what that says about my mental health, but for now I'll keep doing my Sudoku puzzles and learning new things and making new friends to help "strengthen" my brain. But this is a post about the force and power of one of my memories and how small moments from our childhoods can affect the courses of our lives.

Better for Boys

This morning, I was rudely awakened from a rather interesting dream. In the dream, I was staying in a hotel with some others - and for some reason we had several "extra guests" in this very nice hotel, so we had to move them from room to room to keep them from being discovered. That was just the weird part. The interesting part was happening to move by a table on which was laid a dozen different foods, mostly pastries and confections and snack-type foods, and one rather curious mailbox.

The food, it turned out, was quite tasty, but wholly organic and with very little in the way of sweeteners - "healthy" snacks. The mailbox was what has stuck in my mind though. It was blue and made of the same sort of material that is used on ranches to pen in the animals. A sturdier metal of some sort. It had hinges on either side, about mid-way down the body of the piece, as well as at the "regular" spot to allow the door to open and midway down the back panel. The side- and back-panel hinges were not the sort that allowed the pieces to open, but they allowed the box to "give" when pushed at (or hit.) Curiously - and I wasn't able to figure out the purpose for this part - there was a black sort of rubber "bumper" bar at the top of the front. The door was more squared off than the standard rounded top as well.

The company putting it out was called "Better for Boys" and their premise was to offer items that are better for their health (and would therefore, help keep more boys off of medication for ADHD diagnoses) or items that can stand up to the abuse a boy, or group of boys, puts on an object. I can imagine more of what might be sold by such a company: walls or wall paint that can stand up to graffiti (or that can wash itself!), the malleable mailbox, bunk beds that double as climbing walls... you get the idea (and the reminder that I have three boys of my own!)

Lord knows that with four children and a fifth coming, I don't have the resources currently to start such a company - but perhaps it would make a good future home school project to design some of these items! So barring a company to create and sell items such as these, the question then becomes is it good for us to offer boys items that will save them from their natural instincts? I mean this question more in the sense of offering them items they can all-but destroy vs. teaching them, and expecting them, to have self-mastery and self-control over their natural impulses to act out in ways that make items such as these necessary and tempting to society's young men.

I would not suggest that it is never right for boys to be boys. When ours were young - very young - they were climbers (and still are!) To keep them moderately safe, we went to IKEA (marvelous place for some things, including kids' toys!) and bought a ladder designed to be attached to an interior wall, along the studs. We put this in their room right next to the book shelf, so they can pull out their books without pulling the shelf over at the same time! The ladder is no longer next to the shelf, but it is still in the room. The boys don't use it so much any more. It is not high enough for them now, it seems (how they grow!) but Buttercup is on her rise to stardom as a Champion Edens Climber.

I delight in watching her reach these same milestones that her brothers did at about the same age (under two.) It scares the heck out of parents at the ... (pick one) ball field, grocery store, playground, etc. She climbs whenever she gets the chance. Though rare, she even manages to give me a bit of a jolt every now and then. But we taught her early on to climb stairs fairly safely so we are slightly more confident in her ability to follow her joy in this. Does this immunize her from the possibility that anything bad will happen? No, but perhaps it is better to help them remain safe through use of moderately safer equipment than to remove the equipment all together.

Our boys though have missed out on many of the old playground toys that we had as children because of an overzealous society wanting to protect from every aspect of possible harm. No longer do we see see-saws (or teeter-totters, depending on where you grew up!), merry-go-rounds or metal slides. My kids are probably happier without the metal slides, but a part of me wishes those other bits of fun were still around and we hadn't sterilized everything so much. What we have now are spaces that make it more difficult to run off their energy and their need to move; we've insisted that they sit in a room all day and try to think while being still (for my Smeagol, that seems almost impossible!). We've watched them struggle to comply, and then put them on medication for not being able to maintain focus under such circumstances.

So the answer to my original question - whether it is better to teach them to behave or to offer them objects that can withstand potential misuse and abuse - lies pretty squarely in the middle. Over time, teach them to stay still, to think, to contemplate. Also find ways to give them freedom to run, jump, climb and to take a few risks so they can reason out for themselves how to avoid danger. This balance is what they need to grow, and with a little guidance from us they will be the bright stars they are meant to be. If we learn to stop ourselves from rushing to "talk to someone" or fix things when they make poor choices, and to avoid bringing them out of the tree when they get a little higher than our stomachs like, they will learn lessons that will help them all the days of their lives. The tendency of children to get into slightly risky situations is both the gut-wrenching fear, and the joy, that comes from being parents as we watch them grow and thrive.

Embracing Your Purpose - II

So now that I'm almost another year older, and far wiser, what goals have I for myself? Where am I going next? How am I getting there? I am determined to be debt free (except for the house) by my 36th birthday in 2012 - for that, we have started following Dave Ramsey's program and advice (again, there is another blog post in that, but that is for another time!) As a side note, his program has helped I don't know how many thousands of people and can be found here: www.daveramsey.com - it is worth every penny.

I'm determined to get the many schedules that run my life into a working order that can be synchronized and followed. I don't have a program for that (many use flylady.com though, if that is something you're struggling with but it didn't work so well for me about ten years ago; perhaps I should try it again...) Right now, I see many parallels between the house/clutter-freedom and the budget/debt-freedom. I'm working from that point - but there is one other very important thing that goes with these two goals:

I have learned that, in my own life, to make these two goals happen, I need to stop worrying about working outside of my home at everyone else's projects, at every other volunteer opportunity that comes up that may - or may not - be edifying to my family and me, at every piece that I think I "should" be doing to take some of the financial-breadwinner burden off of Jeff's shoulders.

He has never - ever - said a sideways word about my staying home or about being our primary source of income. The pressure I feel in that comes entirely from within me. The pressure is there, nonetheless, and I am learning that my first job is house and family - there is plenty to do there. My second job is Heritage Transcriptions, in which I get to write memorial books for the families of the fallen members of our military. That is a labor of love. I feel more fulfilled in my life by doing them.

Otherwise, I must be content with "just" being a stay-at-home-mom. I must ignore the looks, the questions, the ugliness that we SAHMs get when we are out and about, especially the looks that see four children and inquire, "Don't you know when to stop??"

For the record, we do know when to stop, but we've decided to love and enjoy all that we're given. Though I am religious and a Christian, I'm not a "quiverful," Bible-thumper type of person: each family has to make its own choices. This is what works for our family, but here is the irony about our having children and choosing to have - or not have - those children with which we are blessed:

Indulge me for a minute in a side-rambling, please: Is it "irony?" I am a little nervous about using the word because of the song by Alanis Morrisette - Ironic - I read an article by a professor after it came out in which the professor said that nothing in the song was ironic; that everything she mentioned in the song was just bad luck! ... isn't it ironic? Don't'cha' think?? So anyway... end side-rambling now. Read on and weigh in...

Here is my sister working with Buttercup in our garden earlier this year. She doesn't plan to have children right now, and I am content to let her be the great-aunt-type to mine! She does a great job!

So here is the possible irony in our having children: when I was sixteen, like many girls, I declared my intention to adopt many children - a busload of them - and never have any of my own. Why would I want to have children of my own when there are so many out there already who need help?? Then I met Jeff and he wanted children - at least one or two - and so we compromised. We would have a couple few bio-babies, then we would adopt at some point in our lives together.

Well, we're up four children and I love them all and wouldn't trade them for anything. They are part of my super-blessed life and to those who would say that I am helping with the "overpopulation" of the world, I say this: which child would you want put back? Which human being would you get rid of? Ponder that, then talk to me. And adoption is still on the table and something we plan to do in our lives.

So what does all of this have to do with "embracing your purpose?" Only this: sometimes, our purpose in life is not really what we might have thought it was. Maybe, just maybe what I want/ed was not what was best for me or where I was really heading in my life and I just didn't know it. Learning to pray, learning to listen for the answer, learning to wait and knowing that what is coming is ultimately leading me to where I need to go to fulfill my purpose in life, gives me peace and makes every step of the way count.

If my purpose is to be a great stay-at-home-mom, who bakes, sews/crochets and does the domestic goddess thing, and on the side, I get to support military folks and their families by writing memorial books, I am at peace with that. It is not what I envisioned when I joined the Navy all those years ago - and it is still on my heart to one day learn to fly, just not F-16s (for the reference to that, go to Embracing Your Purpose - I), but it is where I am now and what I truly believe I have been led to do. In the future, when my children leave home, who knows what my purpose will become? But every moment of what is happening now is leading me to that purpose, whatever "it" is.

Each of us needs to ask similar questions, determine our purposes and learn to embrace who we are. If you don't feel like you're in the right place, make changes to become who you're supposed to be. But consider whether your purpose might not be very different than what you once envisioned and that attitude makes a huge difference in our happiness within that purpose.

As my mother used to say when we asked (whined!), "Do I have to?"

Pause for the big smile, "You get to."